It’s a movie about 4 humanoid giant turtles who talk like surfers and are ninjas. They’re lead by a giant humanoid Japanese martial arts master rat. And bad guy is a Japanese ninja who wears a really bad hat and has a clan of ninja thieves roaming New York. The turtles sidekicks are a TV reporter and a guy that fights crime using various sports equiptment.
And they played it straight.
Unless they turned it into a comedy I don’t see how you could make a better film out of that back story…
Are you familiar at all with Eastman and Laird’s original black and white comics? The ones that (somewhat loosely) inspired the cartoon series that I suspect Ebert was referring to when he wrote about “source material”? Because if you were, I seriously doubt you’d be making this statement.
At any rate, the original TMNT didn’t play it straight, not totally. The concept is inherently silly, I doubt there are many people who would argue otherwise. The original comics, dark in tone thought they often were, also had plenty of humor because, in a comic about mutant turtle ninjas, how could you not?
The first TMNT movie was great, certainly as good as anyone could hope for in terms of a live-action version of a comic book/cartoon, but there are plenty of ways you could make a better movie. For one thing make it animated, because making something like TNMT where most of the main characters aren’t human is always going to be problematic. Make it darker in tone like the comics, but without losing its edge of humor either.
Would a movie like that be succesful? Probably not, but it could conceivably be better than the first TMNT movie.
There’s always a way things can be better. I generally avoid looking at things in those terms (unless of course they suck) but the Ebert quote you brought up sort of forces me to.
Fibber- It is obvious from the post that he does not have any familiarity with the source.
Having not caught any of the new show, I am pleased to here the description of the scientist (whose name escapes me right now). Black scientist guy is the exact way he was created in the original comic.
I’m curious to know if they have April as a black female as well, since that is how she was portrayed in the original.
I do, actually :). I was looking at it more from what a potential producer might have been thinking on reading a synopsis of the movie.
I’m a bit hazy, but wasn’t the most popular things about the TMNT the Saturday morning cartoons and the toys?
Whoever managed to convince a studio to bankroll a serious, live action movie based on what most people saw as a kids tv show must have been able to sell ice-cubes to Eskimoes!
I always wondered why, in the original cartoon series, they felt the need to turn Baxter Stockman into a white guy, but consider that they took the Utroms (the brain aliens) and turned them into Krang, I guess Baxter got off easy.
As for April, she’s the same redheaded Irish lass they turned her into for the toon, only this time around she was Stockman’s lab assisstant instead of a tv reporter.
Nah, I imagine that it was a pretty easy sell given the Turtle’s popularity. (And the movie wasn’t all that serious.)
Now the guy who convinced someone that a live-action Garbage Pail Kids movie was a good idea . . .
It’s been so long since I read the original Turtles books (I still own the whole run, but it’s buried somewhere amongst the thousand of comics I own) that I’d forgotten that April was Stockman’s lab assistant in the original comics as well. The more I think about it, the more I’m surprised by how faithful this new toon is to the original comics.
My mind’s been poisoned by the cartoon, as it was more a component of my youth than the original comics, which I didn’t start collecting until years later.
Well then, I am eager to see it. I know that the fact that they got rid of the cartoony eyes was heralded in my house with great joy.
I gave up on Ninja Turtles entirely when they had the live action show that came on right after Power Rangers. Why? They tried to add a fifth Ninja Turtle, a girl called Venus De Milo.
Didn’t they learn anything from the Beatles and Yoko Ono?